Can better sex be achieved with a bit of mindfulness?
Research suggests multitasking could be impeding happier, fulfilling sex
Google “How to have better sex” and you’ll come up with thousands of suggestions, ranging from inventive bedroom techniques to lacy lingerie to — and this is not a joke — a recommendation for turning household chores into foreplay.
Lori A. Brotto insists there is a better way to superior sex — and one that science has proven to guarantee results.
The Canada Research Chair in Women’s Sexual Health has spent more than 15 years studying the link between mindfulness and sexual desire and satisfaction. She says incorporating mindfulness and meditation practices into daily life can help women have happier, more fulfilling sex. Brotto, who is a clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecol- ogy at the University of British Columbia, has turned her research findings into a book called Better Sex Through Mindfulness: How Women Can Cultivate Desire.
Rooted in science, the book includes mindfulness exercises that anyone can try at home. It also tells the stories of women who embraced Brotto’s techniques and went from being unhappy and unsatisfied in the bedroom to being in love with sex — and themselves.
Is your book radical or do we as a society have solutions for sex completely wrong?
We live in a culture that has been looking for a quick fix in the form of a pill or a specific kind of aid or in something that we read. So this approach using mindfulness, which has a long history in Eastern Buddhist meditation practices, feels quite radical.
But when we understand what mindfulness is teaching us, at its most basic level, it’s about paying attention, and doing so in a non-judgmental way. From that perspective, it’s really not all that radical because mindfulness is a skill many people already practice in pockets of their life — perhaps when deeply engaged in a great conversation with someone, or maybe at a fantastic restaurant and deliciously enjoying every bite.
Those can be very mindful moments, where nothing else seems to matter. We all have this capacity to be mindful but the idea that we can cultivate it as a skill and apply it to sex hasn’t been discussed that much before.
What do you say to people who feel like mindfulness isn’t for them, especially when it comes to using it for better sex?
I can understand that feeling. Mindfulness has really hit prime time over the last few decades, and you can scan the shelves at your local book store and see mindfulness as a treatment for just about everything. Along with that, there are some suspicions about whether this is a new-age fad or something just for yoga enthusiasts.
But really, when we peel back that superficial layer and understand what it is, we learn it’s about paying attention — something each one of us has the capacity to do. We know this because we are born this way. You can look at a child in a bed of flowers, gazing intently on each petal, or a child running in a playground, laughing, fully present in that moment.
What happens over time is we lose that ability or we lose the strength in our mindfulness muscle as we become busier with more and more tasks.
Yet we live in a society that seems to reward multitasking.
But really multitasking means we are not fully completing any one task. When we switch between tasks there is a cognitive load that goes along with that, meaning it takes longer to start up again when you switch back.
That’s associated with more errors and less proficiency in how we do things. Mindfulness is a skill that can be learned but also it’s one that’s deeply innate within each of us.
How can multitasking interfere with a satisfying sex life?
The kind of multitasking that many of us do throughout the day doesn’t simply stop when one decides they want to be sexual. It’s not like you say, “Okay, now I’m going to turn my mind to sex and I’ll be unilaterally focused on sex and no intrusions will get in the way.”
That simply doesn’t happen because the brain has become so accustomed to this multitasking; it’s almost like a habit that needs to be undone. We commonly hear stories from people saying their mind drifts during sex. It might drift to benign topics, like: “What am I going to have for dinner?” It can also drift to more catastrophic places, like: “What if my partner notices this part of my body that I really don’t like?” or “What if I don’t respond with an orgasm?”
So the same kinds of distractions we are prone to in our daily life manifest during sex. And if the person has any degree of negative expectations or low sexual self-esteem, then they are even more prone to have those negative intrusions interfere in their mind.
What happens during sex when you can’t let go of the multitasking?
Because there is often an abrupt transition between the task you are involved in and deciding to have a sexual encounter, there is often no anticipation, no mental foreplay, no forethought or fantasizing what that encounter might look like.
We know sexual response is not just a reflex; that’s been disproven in countless research studies. It’s not the case that if you are stimulated for a certain amount of time, at a certain intensity, you will be become aroused and have an orgasm. That’s not how sexual response unfolds. It really requires this back-and-forth communication between the brain and the body.
If there is not that transition period, where the person anticipates sex, looks forward to it, readies for it, then it means the brain isn’t ready for those sexual cues. And when that happens you might say: “My partner was touching my body in the same way they always did and it was not arousing, in fact it hurt, and I certainly didn’t get to orgasm and in my head I was feeling frustrated that this same touch that five or 10 or even 30 years ago was so exciting to me is now something I view as irritating or annoying.”
Many of us have lengthy to-do lists and adding mindfulness practice will be just one more thing. How do we make time?
I have no magic to discover that 25th hour of the day but ideally each of us would be practicing mindfulness. Even in little ways we can deliberately incorporate the practice in our daily life to make it more habitual. For example, beginning with our meals. Can we choose 10 minutes of a meal every single day where we make a firm commitment to eat mindfully? That means turning off all the distractions — and if you’re dining with others, letting them know this can be done together. And this (looks like) savouring every bite and feeling what every morsel feels like and smells like.
Also, while waiting for an elevator, instead of reaching for your cell phone, you can use the wait as an opportunity to do a brief body scan. So, starting with the toes of the feet and gradually working upwards to the top of the head, guiding attention to the different parts of the body and noticing what it feels like. We are not trying to change anything, we are not trying to relax the muscles, we are paying attention to fully notice all the sensations. It is important to exercise that muscle of mindfulness in the same way that, to have a certain muscular tone in the body requires lifting weights.
You dedicate your book to “All the women who trusted that a fulfilling sex life was just a breath away.” Tell me a bit about that sentence.
This book is for the hundreds of women who took a chance, many of whom were quite skeptical, about this process. (They said things like) “How on earth is paying attention to my breath going to help with my lack of orgasms? How on earth is paying attention to the feelings in my toes going to help me want sex more?”
At face value, it’s a very understandable kind of skepticism. My response to them has always been: Let’s take a chance; let’s try this experiment for eight weeks. And I have been struck by the numbers of women who have said: “Wow, I’d never have thought I could learn to redirect my attention and I would certainly never have believed this was a way to enjoy sex again, to have my sexual desire come back, to have my orgasms come back.”
For me, that has been incredibly rewarding. It has been these women’s personal testimonies as well as scads of data that we collect (in our lab) that has provided a convincing picture that mindfulness can be effective for women across all ages, across all cultures, regardless of their sexual difficulties.